2010: another EU target nears extinction

Will the hyacinth macaw fall victim to Europe’s bid to become more competitive? After a year of complaints that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso is ignoring environmental concerns altogether in favour of a growth and jobs agenda, will a proposal on sustainable development this month redress the balance?

A European sustainable development strategy (SDS) was adopted by EU heads of state and governments in 2001. The Commission on 13 December is set to publish an eagerly awaited review.

Modelled on the 2000 Lisbon Agenda for growth, the SDS sets out priorities for making sure the EU grows in a way that can be maintained economically, socially and environmentally. It quickly came to be known as the green counterpart to the business-friendly Lisbon Agenda.

Governments, wary of signing up to promises that could compromise their work on economic competitiveness, made sure that most of the concrete aims proposed by the Commission were stripped from the final strategy.

And one of the few aims that somehow survived has haunted Europe ever since. This is the idea of ending the loss of plant and animal species before the end of the decade - in the strategy's own terms, "halting biodiversity decline with the aim to reach this objective by 2010".

A major UN report in March confirmed that, far from coming to a halt, biodiversity loss in Europe and elsewhere was in fact speeding up. If a commitment to stop this process by 2010 sounded ambitious four years ago, today it risks looking like self-delusion.

On the other hand, a sustainable development strategy stripped of the aim that has come to define it could struggle to justify its existence. But many observers now fear that species loss will not be a priority in a reviewed strategy.

Even if biodiversity survives, anything that could be interpreted as watering down the strategy will, in the current climate, leave the Commission facing the full wrath of environmentalists.

Having already complained that this year's thematic strategies on areas of environmental concern were weakened because of industry lobbying, that chemicals legislation REACH risks suffering the same fate at the hands of governments and MEPs, and that transport proposals gave too much ground to car manufacturers at the expense of the environment, several green groups are now pinning all their hopes on the SDS.

Plenty of observers last September reassured themselves that, though Barroso had played down the importance of the environment pillar of Lisbon, the neglected issues would get the attention they deserve in Gothenburg - the city in which the SDS was agreed and after which it is sometimes named.

In a bid to shore up this impression, the Commission in February published a communication promising a strategy with more concrete targets than the 2001 version - 'headline objectives' and 'intermediate milestones'.

Nervous voices from both the Commission and lobby groups have however begun to wonder whether a strategy handled not by any of the departments with a vested interest in it, such as environment and enterprise, but by the secretariat-general, will deliver anything tough enough.

The SDS has also suffered to some extent by being a wide rather than deep strategy, characterised by the hazy overview that comes from not focusing on one area. The SDS was intended to underpin all EU proposals, but the difficulty of defining what it stands for is one reason why this has proved so hard.

The strategy therefore tends to overlap with, rather than underlie, a lot of EU thinking. The Lisbon Agenda is the most obvious example, but the SDS also touches on, for instance, corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Enterprise Commissioner Günter Verheugen in March even said CSR was "part of the glue" linking Lisbon with Gothenburg.

If the SDS disappoints, as some now fear, and if species loss does not come through as a priority, the biodiversity communication expected next year could give it a second chance.

If the 2010 target does not find a place there, it may be left to die off, along with the hyacinth macaw.

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